Wireless communication terminals have to be equipped both with a display screen and with receiving and transmitting means, more specifically antenna means. It is important that the display means is able to present optical information with a high resolution and of a high quality. It is also important that the receiving and transmitting capability of the wireless communication terminal is good. Among other things it should be possible to provide a good coverage for all possible radio communication channels (supposing that the wireless communication terminal communicates by means of radio waves). For the communication network it is important to be able to provide a good transmission capacity and quality, for single links as well as for the radio network as a whole. It should also be possible to exploit the potential transmission capacity as much as possible. Therefore a wireless communication terminal may be equipped with multiple antennas which couple independently to the different degrees of freedom of a radio channel. For a single wave, the degrees of freedom are generally the direction and the polarization, whereas in a real channel, a transmitted wave is scattered by physical objects in the surrounding environment, resulting in a so called multi-path channel. For a multi-path channel there are many different pathways corresponding to different directions, at the receiver as well as at the transmitter.
For a laptop (one example of a wireless communication terminal) it is known to use the frame surrounding the laptop display for an antenna means. However, the available space on the frame is quite limited which restricts where and how antenna means can be located and it becomes difficult to take full advantage of the available data transmission capacity and to meet the objects referred to above. It also becomes difficult to handle real multi-path channels. In addition thereto, since the available space is limited, it is not possible to position antenna elements according to the needs to a sufficient extent, at least for many applications, particularly for advanced wireless communication systems or high speed wireless communication systems which require multiple antennas or antenna arrays. This means that it becomes difficult to provide sufficient coverage for all possible radio channel directions. To overcome these problems, the frame could be made larger which either would result in a larger laptop, which is inconvenient, or in a smaller screen. With a smaller screen, the optical representation capability will suffer, which also is inconvenient.
As an alternative to the frame, it is also known to use the back side of a laptop display for an antenna arrangement. Then the antenna elements will be screened in the opposite direction and since the radio paths having the best gain typically are concentrated within in a limited angular range, the strongest paths then will be heavily attenuated, which is a serious problem. This problem will be of considerable importance for future high speed wireless communication systems.
As can be seen there are so far no satisfactory solutions, particularly for wireless communication units, to provide a functioning display for optical representation at the same time as a flexible and controllable antenna arrangement, since the location of the antenna arrangement is given by the display arrangement. Either it has to be located at the back of the display or in the frame surrounding the display, which strongly limits the capacity/quality of the antenna arrangement. A fundamental problem is that the antenna arrangement and the display arrangement in known arrangements interfere with each other or affect each other negatively and so far it has not been possible to provide a combined arrangement wherein both functionalities (the functionality of optical representation and the functionality of receiving/transmitting radio waves etc.) fulfill high requirements at the same time. It has so far not been possible to provide a combined display and antenna arrangement, or more a generally a receiving/transmitting arrangement, wherein the display and its optical representation capabilities are not impaired or affected by the antenna arrangement and, vice versa, wherein the antenna arrangement and particularly its receiving and transmitting capabilities are not impaired by the display arrangement.